Strangers

He flicked the end of his middle finger against the smoldering cigarette, this man who sat beside me, silent and hunched over with his elbows resting on his knees.
Traffic blew past us both at this rickety bus stop; loud, ongoing and ceaseless like multicolored waves above a black ocean bottom.

The ashes fell to the worn cement, becoming just filth among more filth on the cracked sidewalks of Los Angeles. I imagined they all connected at some point somewhere, these sidewalks; linking everything and everyone who walked these excited, black streets like joined hands or fingers...

I squeezed my arms closer to my sides, crushing my hoodie to me against the cool air of the night. And I sighed, my breath hovering for a moment before my lips, the ghastly vapor twisting and swirling as if struggling to form into something else, fighting to take real shape, before it faded away in time for the next one.

"No...no, no, no. I'll be home in a minute, sweetie. Okay?"

A shadow intruded the path of tawny, orange light cast from the streetlamp nearby, someone's jolting shape creeping further and further down the sidewalk in time with the sharp clicking of heels.

"Of course not literally in a minute, sweetie..."

She strutted past as I lifted my eyes to her, a woman in a dull red coat with a phone pressed to her ear and an expensive-looking purse swinging daintily on an arm.

And as she did, in the light you could see her face clearer than anything else. Thick, dark hair coiled into a worn French twist. Penciled-on eyebrows and bright red lipstick against pale skin. Mouth parting rapidly for words to rush out into the dark distance.

She seemed...real.

"Right...right. Go and tell your brother to settle down or else all his new toys are going back to the store..." She existed in this short moment; mattered.

She made those brisk steps along the pavement in front of the bustop and she sprang away from the backdrop of the world - became the mother of somebody, making her way home from work; somebody's wife or girlfriend. In the light of the streetlamp she had a name, had an identity; was an actual person.

"...Mmhmm. I love you, too, sweetie."

But then the voice began to fade, along with the noise of her heels, and then eventually her body as she passed the boundary of the streetlight, melding into the dark beyond. She was no longer she. Just another part of the world around this bustop - apart of the distant, blazing, electric skyline. I didn't know her. But I could have.

The man sitting beside me took a drag from his cigarette, his figure holding still in the shade of the booth for a second, before he dropped his arm back down and released a whistling stream of smoke from his lips.

I looked down again, scraping my fingernails at some old and chipped nail polish on my thumb, thinking about my own home.
Mom would be walking through the door around this time. She'd bring in the cold of the world with the weary expression on her face.
I knew that expression too well. And I was very acquainted with her sighs as she lay down for the first time in eight hours. Knew them better than I think I knew her. She was gone most of the time, after all; working hard to support what we had....

The booth was suddenly illuminated with the harsh, crisp snap of a lighter igniting.
I turned slightly, glancing at the flame being held up to the man's face as he lit another cig. It shared a life with the fire; flaring with lowered eyelids, underlined cheekbones, puckered lips, and golden skin, before his thumb released the clasp and all went back to shadow.

He reminded me of the woman who'd passed by just now. But what was his story?
He hadn't said a word since he'd plopped himself down on this bench a quarter of an hour ago, so he remained a complete mystery; a question open to any answer. Yet as long as he sat here with me, waiting for the bus that would take the both us down the same road, he was significant.

Important so long as he stayed in my sphere of awareness; stayed in place within the orange-lit boundary of my own streetlight.

I could know him, right? A look upwards to the sky and the possibility does actually hang, extended, from the stars. I could know him as well as I knew myself....
Or I could decide not to, allowing him to become another face among the other hundreds of thousands I'd seen today. Just another nobody with an irrelevant existence.

That's the funny thing about strangers, though. There's a magic in them all. There's a magic in the tangibility of others.

It simply radiates off of them, especially in a lingering glance - or something muttered yet unintelligible. But it's up to us to choose whether we even believe in magic. Whether to ignore the thread hanging from a star, seen through the single, small smile of someone unfamiliar; or to meet the stars halfway, and grasp it.

Down the avenue, the heavy rush and roar of an engine grew more and more pronounced, while bright headlights nearly blinded and a pixel board reading "Route 452 Normandy Ave" in neon orange letters surged steadily towards our stop.

We both stood up and stepped towards the edge of the sidewalk.
I turned to watch it coming and, at the same time, could see the man's face completely for the first time in the imparting glow of the streetlamp.

He didn't look that much older than I was. Maybe eighteen or nineteen. He had extremely light hair, most likely dyed, and trimmed short; the ends bleached and curling around the bottom of his ears. He had the stoniest expression; eyebrows furrowed and mouth sealed shut. And everything he had on was black, including the gages in his ears.
But there was a tattoo resting in the spot just below his jaw. It was of a lipstick-imprinted kiss, brilliant in red, and underlined with one name in cursive: Mom.

So much revealed through so little.

He took one last puff of his cigarette before he threw it down and crushed it with his shoe.

A squeal from the bus' brakes, and wide windows with bright artificial light bursting through them were stopped before us. Everyone seated aboard, contrastingly enough, were nothing but silhouettes in black from where I stood outside.
Inside, it was a flurry of color among the benches, and yet...the shade remained in their avoiding eyes and turned-away faces. Even the bus driver kept his eyes looking out the windshield.

Walking down the aisle way, trailing past the other passengers, it seemed a lot harder to believe in anything here, under the pale fluorescent lighting, than it did outside on the quiet bustop.

But I plopped down beside him, the same man with his mother's kiss everlasting on his skin, and - with a jolt - the bus propelled us, all of us together, down the dark lane, and into the heart of L.A.....